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Read other letters about this article
In response to "actually it happens pretty often":
I don't pretend to have any knowledge about these statistics beyond the results of half-assed google searches. However, quoting from your post "Most murder-suicides with three or more victims involved a family annihilator". In other words, they are not RANDOM shootings. So, if police were responding based on the statistics that you are quoting, they definitely should have warned people close to the shooter (had they known who he was). However, they still would not have any reason to think that he was going to go on a random shooting spree. I am fairly certain that this probability is very small, even given the knowledge that the person had already committed some murders.
Again, it is not a matter that the police didn't take it seriously because it was apparently domestic violence. It was that nothing about the crime scene indicated that the shooter was going on a random shooting spree.
I ask for the third time: Do you think that communities should respond to all domestic violence murders as if they were random killing sprees in progress? If not, what information did VA Tech decision makers have to indicate that this particular incident was different?
